Are we there yet?
My husband often surprises me when we’re driving and he can name the fanciest car on the road. He knows the make and model and without flinching he gets a little zing with explanation. If you knew my husband, this would be more amusing, because he’s not your average ‘car-guy’.
The analogy is useful for two reasons — it’s about cars, and cars have indicators; and because his knowledge of cars indicates something to me, which has nothing to do with pent-up-petrol-headedness, and much more to do with a love of design.
We get asked for metrics, measures, indicators and results — and these words are used interchangeably. There’s not really any point in clearing up the definitions because depending on your field and the culture of your workplace, you’ll use a different term anyway.
What we’ve found is that the concept of measurement is important to people because they’re looking to understand and find out about change and to convey a story of change in a way that can be understood with many other people. At its most basic, we understand measures as useful because they allow us the power of translation and of being understood. We can explain easily that we’ve grown an inch, walked a mile, raised a million dollars, sold a thousand units or made an audience laugh.
So, first it’s useful to define what you’re measuring. It should have already happened, but you’ll need to have ambition, outcomes, activities, impact — and they’ll need to be defined, understood and shared between a community. In a workplace, in a team, these are about shared beliefs about where the destination is you’re heading, or goals that you’re all working towards. This is a pretty tricky thing to do and needs time, energy and commitment.
Next, it’s important to be realistic about your expectations of what an indicator, metric or measure can do as you develop them. Remember, it is an indicator — it isn’t the change.
Ask yourself:
- Is it relevant and is there a relationship between the metric/indicator and the area you are looking to see change in?
- Is it important and will signify that change is taking place?
- Is it useful and will collecting information about it support improvement efforts and/or decision making?
- Is it feasible and can you actually collect information about it?
- Will it be credible and do others use indicators like this rather than you just making up your own?
What we often find is that constructive and fascinating conversations take place when criteria like these are applied to the building of shared indicators for measuring progress towards shared outcomes. Suddenly, we stop talking about lives saved and greenhouse gas emissions and we start talking about the work teams are actually involved in, as well as how the work they are doing is effecting (or not effecting) the areas in the world we would like to see change in.
Indicators can move in positive directions and negative directions. Either way, they should trigger us to look deeper and explore further. That’s what indicators can do — indicate if a change has taken place or not.
Part 2/3 in a series on measurement.
